An Affirmative Critique

Chris Mason and Michael Moran

This chapter critically explores the deployment of social enterprise in UK and Australian social enterprise policy-making by the leaders of the two countries’ Conservative parties. To do so, we explore the place of social enterprise in the Big Society: the policy philosophy that initially occupied the policy agenda of David Cameron in the UK and briefly of Tony Abbott in Australia. We apply Wingo’s framework of ‘veil politics’ to present the social enterprise myth as aesthetic adornment, tempting wider engagement and as idealization. Having unpacked how these leaders deployed social enterprise, we used Derrida’s concept of iterability to contribute a new explanation of the different trajectories of social enterprise myths in the two countries, as shown through the failed transition of the Big Society project from the UK to Australia.

Edited by Michael R. Redclift and Marco Grasso

Aarti Gupta and Michael Mason

Transparency, as information disclosure, is becoming a widely accepted norm and set of practices in global climate governance. Disclosure of climate-related information is mainly seen as a way to monitor and/or reward various actors’ climate mitigation actions, thereby contributing, at least in principle, to the accountability both of private disclosers for their (non-)performance, and also of public policymakers for the reach and effectiveness of governance outcomes. Transparency’s transformative effects in global climate governance remain particularly important to consider, given the increasingly heterogeneous and fragmented nature of such governance—encompassing treaties, transnational municipal networks, subnational actors, bilateral agreements and voluntary corporate initiatives. In assessing the transformative potential of transparency in the climate realm, this chapter focuses, first, on contentious debates within the UNFCCC around measuring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems that seek to make transparent who is doing what, how, and to what end in combating climate change. Second, the focus is on private carbon disclosure initiatives and transparency arrangements that underpin voluntary carbon offset markets. The chapter concludes that the transformative potential of transparency is being compromised by an increasing privatization and marketization of disclosure initiatives in the climate realm.